> If you want to upgrade your 256 kbit/s AAC to lossless in a couple of years then leave the proof of purchase IN your iTunes Plus > tracks. It enables iTunes to tell that you bought the track from iTunes Store. If you use this app on your iTunes Plus tracks > you will be buying lossless for full price like a newbie
Gee, if only there was some way of writing plaintext information to AAC atoms. Unfortunately, consumers don't have access to the supercomputer clusters Apple must use to write a few lines of text to a metadata tag, cementing their bullet-proof proof of purchase scheme.
You fail it. (It is deserving an "Informative" tag.)
This is in the summary as well, "unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling". Could you explain what this means? Maybe it's just because I don't live in the US, but why would you get a limited number of minutes, but "unlimited" calls to other mobiles? Aren't most calls made from a mobile phone to another mobile phone?
> For example, you can mark a gif file by inserting information in unused portions of the color table and leaving the image data
> completely untouched. Is this a watermark by pour definition? Or is it one only if used color entries or pixel entries are altered?
> Or is it a watermark of the container, but not the data (even though it is potential data...)?
The defining feature of a digital watermark is that it cannot be removed given only the watermarked data. That is its point. A digital photograph emblazoned with a watermark cannot readily be transformed into the original. A digital video file with an invisible-to-the-human-eye-digiatl-watermark inserted to allow the owners of the video's copyright to see who has leaked a copy if it to p2p is useful only because the altered bits cannot be reset to their original state.
So you see, the idea of calling this a watermark isn't just fudging the concept slightly. It's nonsense. It is completely trivial to remove the identifying information, so it is innapropriate to call it a watermark because it neither performs the function nor attempts to perform the function of a watermark.
> The tags added by the iTunes store make it easy for you to prove that you purchased the tracks
No! They allow you to prove precisely one thing, and that is the tracks contain a completable editable and non-authoratative item of metadata that describes certain data about you. They don't prove who owns the tracks, who bought the tracks, where the tracks have been, who's done what with them - they're a post-it note on a car saying "Dave bought this car". Anyone can put on a new post-it note saying something different, or remove the post-it note altogether.
The amount of FUD on this topic has been unbelievable.
> Er, anyway, back on topic: Watermarking is, by definition, not DRM.
And this isn't watermarking. Digital watermarking changes content to encode some kind of message. When you buy DRM-free tunes from iTunes, the actual content, the AAC stream, contains no watermark. If you buy the same DRM-free song from five different accounts, all the AAC streams will be bit-for-bit identical. All that's included is a tag, in plaintext, which contains your info. You can read it, you can edit it, you can remove it. Not DRM, not a watermark.
Our obsession with innovation also blinds us to how much of technology is focussed on keeping things the same. The dikes of Holland maintain the integrity of the nation, and great ingenuity goes into preserving and improving them. We're going to need a lot more, and more powerful, technologies of conservation: not just the technologies of levees and barriers against the ocean but technologies to maintain the supply of potable water, breathable air, and arable soil; technologies to maintain as much biodiversity as we can or want to maintain; technologies to preserve and renew our crumbling Victorian legacies of infrastructure (sewers, rail beds, roads, and bridges); technologies to stabilize and prevent the dispersal of radioactive waste. There may be hype attending new technological artifacts, but there's money to be made, and spent, in maintaining them in usable shape. The take-home price of a P.C. is typically only about ten per cent of its lifetime cost, and sixty per cent of the lifetime cost of some military equipment is maintenance. The federal government spends twice as much on preserving highways as it does on building new ones. More than half of automobile-dealer profits come from servicing cars, less than a third from selling new cars, and much the same is true of the civil jet-engine business.
> Your point seems to have changed since you first posted it.
Nope, it hasn't changed one jot. I was simply positing that it makes a great deal of sense to recycle cellulose-based waste locally, if possible. It was you that limited the definition of "recycling".
> Explain, carefully, how you'll get the fibers back through fungal digestion of the used paper.
Examine, carefully, the meaning of the word "supplement". My point was that as there is "no shortage of waste paper", your point about the only purpose behind paper recycling being the recovery of plant fibres doesn't stand up. If used paper can usefully be employed in other ways, there's no reason that these ways should be discounted, simply because they don't produce more paper. Your point is equivalent to saying that recycling glass to make ice grit or for use in hydroponics is pointless, because it doesn't make more glass. That's not the point. The point is it's a useful, environmentally non-destructive use for material that might otherwise be viewed as waste.
> But before you do that, think about all the bleach and chemical additives present in consummer papers, and wonder if you want those in your mushroom soup. br.
The use of edible mycelium to break down waste paper is long established, fungi are _excellent_ at breaking down unpleasant chemicals present in paper and other surplus goods, with a few exceptions such as the heavy metals I mentioned.
> The point of recycling paper is to get the fibers back, not to destroy them.
From the link you posted:
Post-consumer wastepaper is choking our landfills. It is going to incinerators. There is no shortage of wastepaper and we need to concentrate on using it
Use Post-Consumer! It is the goal!
If "there is not shortage of waster paper" and the goal is "use post-consumer", it seems like fungi-based-recycling is perfectly viable as a supplement to turning waste paper back into paper - it's highly efficient, has no harmful waste products, and frees up agricultural land - land that could very well be used for sustainable forestry.
Re:The top layer is for growing plants
on
Vertical Farming
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
> All the bottom layers are for growing mushrooms and cockroaches.
I imagine you're being facetious, but actually, growing edible mushrooms in an urban environment makes a lot of sense - many vigourous strains of edible fungi will grow happily on substrates like discarded coffee grounds, newspaper* and cardboard. Think how much more efficient recycling of cellulose-based waste would be if you didn't have to ship it hundreds of miles to a recycling facility - in fact, you didn't really have to process it at all, except steeping it in water and doing a mild pasteurisation. Best of all, once the fungi has exhausted the substrate, it makes a great compost (most fungi don't use up the nitrogen present in such substrates) which can then be used for agriculture on higher levels! Sustainable and delicious!
*this applies to Western countries, where newspapers are now predominantly printed using soy-based non-toxic inks. This is not a good idea wherever lead-based inks are prevalent, fungi can accumulate heavy metals.
Care to explain what it is? Because I was under impression that in the long-run, the determinants of national output were the factors of production (capital(K) and labour(L)) and technology, and that as in the long-run the factors of production remain constant, the growth of economies relied on technology reducing the scarcity of goods, as has happened throughout modern history.
> Really? Is the time and effort put into creating entertainment, imaginary? If someone pirates entertainment, can all that be gotten back?
Err... if someone produces entertainment that no-one buys or pirates, can the time and effort put into that be gotten back? I don't see your point. Just because time and effort are put into the creation of entertainment is real, doesn't mean that the "losses" caused by someone pirating that entertainment are real. It's entirely possible that every person who pirates the entertainment would never have paid for it, even if it were not available for pirating. Then again, it's entirely possibly that every person who pirated the entertainment would have paid for it were it not available for pirating.
Until someone determines a half-way reliable method of calculating how many people did not pay for the product directly as a result of it being available for pirating, then the "losses" remain as some unknown value between (0 x $PRICE) and ($NUMBEROFPIRATECOPIES x $PRICE).
> This is a perfect example of why we can't trust corporations to do the right thing in this country.
The reason that corporations cannot be trusted to "do the right thing" is because they have been legally constructed in such a way as to prevent any shareholder or employee of that corporation let moral judgements interfere with the profit motive.
If the CEO of a large company decides not to campaign for more police time to be spent on protecting intellectual property because he believes to do so would be "immoral", not only can he be fired, shareholders in the corporation can in fact bring legal action against him for not acting in the best interests of the corporation.
Basically, it's not just that amoral soulless assholes are attracted to executive positions in large corporations, it's also that you cannot serve in an executive position at a large corporation without being an amoral soulless asshole.
> I pirate an album and Britney Spears loses 2 dollars. A girl gets violently raped and her entire life is damaged and she may never
> recover. Which of these two things are more important?
If I pirate a Britney Spears album, my entire life is damaged and I may never recover.
> I can think of heaps of peole, myself included, who would have loved a trip like this, and could have made a detailed write up
> that made sense, and did justice to the hard work and conditions those people work in.
So true. If I was forced by circumstance to work for pennies a day dully repeating the same task over and over again like a soulless automaton, breathing in noxious vapours and having nothing to look forward to in my working life but countless hours of soldering, I know that my biggest concern would be making sure that nerds on/. weren't confused by the minutia of my job due to a poorly-written-up slideshow.
> Yes, but when you start Windows for the first time, it asks you to set a password. When you plug in your router, it does not ask
> you to set up wireless encryption. You can always leave the password blank for Windows, but you were at least given a prompt to set
> one.
Yes, but by default the Adminstrator password is left blank, with the username "Administrator".
Please let's not have another pointless "Is the GIMP a Photoshop replacement?" debate. They're about as pointless as an ostensibly professional-level graphics editing program without proper CMYK support.
> There is no reason a PC is more likely to be infected with "spyware, popups, and other garbage" than an Apple.
You're overstating the case a little, perhaps, but the point is valid.
It's quite possible to harden a Windows box so as to need very little maintenence. The truth is, these days all it takes to set up a reasonably reliable system is a $400 Dell PC with XP and a $50 router with NAT. Install some free AV software like AVG or Avast!, set it to update automatically and use on-access protection, set Windows update to automatically download and install updates, and, critically, give the user(s) of the PC a fifteen minute demonstration of the types of software not to install from untrusted parties, and they shouldn't run into too many problems.
If they do get infected with something after the above scenario, it will typically be because of software they installed despite your warnings on not installing random gratis software from websites hosted in eastern europe - and while there's an endless debate on/. on whether or not OS X and *nix suffer from fewer viruses, exploits and malware because they're inherently more secure or because they have a relatively low market share, it's definitely true that given users that will click through $x warnings from their OS to install the latest coloured cursors or free screensavers from notspyware.biz, it's practically impossible to keep a box running any OS uncompromised without removing the power of the user to administrate their own system entirely.
All we'd need then would be a well-trained team of people to recover damaged robots. If only we could think of a way to make them look non-threatening, so that enemy robots would know not to shoot at them...
It is expected to be ready for testing within five years.
I'm glad they settled on the "bear" look then. Now that that hurdle has been overcome, the only other matter, of designing and building a functional, reliable semi-autonomous bipedal robot, should be trivial.
Hello! Welcome to AT&T PingSelect(tm). Please enter in milliseconds your desired ping time to website "google.com".
>25
Unfortunately, website "google.com" is not available at that ping time. Please contact the website administrator and advise them to upgrade their AT&T PingSelect(tm) package if you wish to ping website "google.com" at this value. Please select another time in milliseconds.
>50
Unfortunately, website "google.com" is not available at that ping time. Please contact the website administrator and advise them to upgrade their AT&T PingSelect(tm) package if you wish to ping website "google.com" at this value. Please select another time in milliseconds.
>100
Pinging google.com [64.233.167.99] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=100ms TTL=247 Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=101ms TTL=247 Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=101ms TTL=247 Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=100ms TTL=247
Ping statistics for 64.233.167.99:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 100ms, Maximum = 101ms, Average = 101ms
You are, of course, referring to the marginal cost of production, ignoring the costs of developing said movie in the first place. By your logic, people pay too much for virtually everything. The marginal cost of producing a brand new computer might be $50- but making the factories that can produce a $100 chip for $1 costs several million dollars, not to mention the salaries of the engineers who designed it and tested prototypes.
Please do yourself a favour and take an economics 101 course. In a perfectly competitive market, marginal cost (MC) is equal to marginal revenue (MR) is equal to price (P). This is where equilibrium is found, and where societal benefit (producer surplus + consumer surplus) is maximised.
Slashdot Mirror
> I've been hearing about incredibly dense optical storage for thirty years now. I have yet to see it.
Why is this modded insightful? TFA refers neither to data density nor optical storage.
Hehe, that was funny... or really lame.
> If you want to upgrade your 256 kbit/s AAC to lossless in a couple of years then leave the proof of purchase IN your iTunes Plus
> tracks. It enables iTunes to tell that you bought the track from iTunes Store. If you use this app on your iTunes Plus tracks
> you will be buying lossless for full price like a newbie
Gee, if only there was some way of writing plaintext information to AAC atoms. Unfortunately, consumers don't have access to the supercomputer clusters Apple must use to write a few lines of text to a metadata tag, cementing their bullet-proof proof of purchase scheme.
You fail it. (It is deserving an "Informative" tag.)
Ah, I see, thank you. Isn't the term a little confusing?
> unlimited mobile-to-mobile
/me is confused
This is in the summary as well, "unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling". Could you explain what this means? Maybe it's just because I don't live in the US, but why would you get a limited number of minutes, but "unlimited" calls to other mobiles? Aren't most calls made from a mobile phone to another mobile phone?
> For example, you can mark a gif file by inserting information in unused portions of the color table and leaving the image data > completely untouched. Is this a watermark by pour definition? Or is it one only if used color entries or pixel entries are altered? > Or is it a watermark of the container, but not the data (even though it is potential data...)?
The defining feature of a digital watermark is that it cannot be removed given only the watermarked data. That is its point. A digital photograph emblazoned with a watermark cannot readily be transformed into the original. A digital video file with an invisible-to-the-human-eye-digiatl-watermark inserted to allow the owners of the video's copyright to see who has leaked a copy if it to p2p is useful only because the altered bits cannot be reset to their original state.
So you see, the idea of calling this a watermark isn't just fudging the concept slightly. It's nonsense. It is completely trivial to remove the identifying information, so it is innapropriate to call it a watermark because it neither performs the function nor attempts to perform the function of a watermark.
> The tags added by the iTunes store make it easy for you to prove that you purchased the tracks
No! They allow you to prove precisely one thing, and that is the tracks contain a completable editable and non-authoratative item of metadata that describes certain data about you. They don't prove who owns the tracks, who bought the tracks, where the tracks have been, who's done what with them - they're a post-it note on a car saying "Dave bought this car". Anyone can put on a new post-it note saying something different, or remove the post-it note altogether.
The amount of FUD on this topic has been unbelievable.
> Er, anyway, back on topic: Watermarking is, by definition, not DRM.
And this isn't watermarking. Digital watermarking changes content to encode some kind of message. When you buy DRM-free tunes from iTunes, the actual content, the AAC stream, contains no watermark. If you buy the same DRM-free song from five different accounts, all the AAC streams will be bit-for-bit identical. All that's included is a tag, in plaintext, which contains your info. You can read it, you can edit it, you can remove it. Not DRM, not a watermark.
Our obsession with innovation also blinds us to how much of technology is focussed on keeping things the same. The dikes of Holland maintain the integrity of the nation, and great ingenuity goes into preserving and improving them. We're going to need a lot more, and more powerful, technologies of conservation: not just the technologies of levees and barriers against the ocean but technologies to maintain the supply of potable water, breathable air, and arable soil; technologies to maintain as much biodiversity as we can or want to maintain; technologies to preserve and renew our crumbling Victorian legacies of infrastructure (sewers, rail beds, roads, and bridges); technologies to stabilize and prevent the dispersal of radioactive waste. There may be hype attending new technological artifacts, but there's money to be made, and spent, in maintaining them in usable shape. The take-home price of a P.C. is typically only about ten per cent of its lifetime cost, and sixty per cent of the lifetime cost of some military equipment is maintenance. The federal government spends twice as much on preserving highways as it does on building new ones. More than half of automobile-dealer profits come from servicing cars, less than a third from selling new cars, and much the same is true of the civil jet-engine business.
> Your point seems to have changed since you first posted it.
Nope, it hasn't changed one jot. I was simply positing that it makes a great deal of sense to recycle cellulose-based waste locally, if possible. It was you that limited the definition of "recycling".
> Explain, carefully, how you'll get the fibers back through fungal digestion of the used paper.
Examine, carefully, the meaning of the word "supplement". My point was that as there is "no shortage of waste paper", your point about the only purpose behind paper recycling being the recovery of plant fibres doesn't stand up. If used paper can usefully be employed in other ways, there's no reason that these ways should be discounted, simply because they don't produce more paper. Your point is equivalent to saying that recycling glass to make ice grit or for use in hydroponics is pointless, because it doesn't make more glass. That's not the point. The point is it's a useful, environmentally non-destructive use for material that might otherwise be viewed as waste.
> But before you do that, think about all the bleach and chemical additives present in consummer papers, and wonder if you want those in your mushroom soup.
br. The use of edible mycelium to break down waste paper is long established, fungi are _excellent_ at breaking down unpleasant chemicals present in paper and other surplus goods, with a few exceptions such as the heavy metals I mentioned.
From the link you posted:
If "there is not shortage of waster paper" and the goal is "use post-consumer", it seems like fungi-based-recycling is perfectly viable as a supplement to turning waste paper back into paper - it's highly efficient, has no harmful waste products, and frees up agricultural land - land that could very well be used for sustainable forestry.
> All the bottom layers are for growing mushrooms and cockroaches.
I imagine you're being facetious, but actually, growing edible mushrooms in an urban environment makes a lot of sense - many vigourous strains of edible fungi will grow happily on substrates like discarded coffee grounds, newspaper* and cardboard. Think how much more efficient recycling of cellulose-based waste would be if you didn't have to ship it hundreds of miles to a recycling facility - in fact, you didn't really have to process it at all, except steeping it in water and doing a mild pasteurisation. Best of all, once the fungi has exhausted the substrate, it makes a great compost (most fungi don't use up the nitrogen present in such substrates) which can then be used for agriculture on higher levels! Sustainable and delicious!
*this applies to Western countries, where newspapers are now predominantly printed using soy-based non-toxic inks. This is not a good idea wherever lead-based inks are prevalent, fungi can accumulate heavy metals.
> Oh there's a "loss"
Care to explain what it is? Because I was under impression that in the long-run, the determinants of national output were the factors of production (capital(K) and labour(L)) and technology, and that as in the long-run the factors of production remain constant, the growth of economies relied on technology reducing the scarcity of goods, as has happened throughout modern history.
> Really? Is the time and effort put into creating entertainment, imaginary? If someone pirates entertainment, can all that be gotten back?
Err... if someone produces entertainment that no-one buys or pirates, can the time and effort put into that be gotten back? I don't see your point. Just because time and effort are put into the creation of entertainment is real, doesn't mean that the "losses" caused by someone pirating that entertainment are real. It's entirely possible that every person who pirates the entertainment would never have paid for it, even if it were not available for pirating. Then again, it's entirely possibly that every person who pirated the entertainment would have paid for it were it not available for pirating.
Until someone determines a half-way reliable method of calculating how many people did not pay for the product directly as a result of it being available for pirating, then the "losses" remain as some unknown value between (0 x $PRICE) and ($NUMBEROFPIRATECOPIES x $PRICE).
> This is a perfect example of why we can't trust corporations to do the right thing in this country.
The reason that corporations cannot be trusted to "do the right thing" is because they have been legally constructed in such a way as to prevent any shareholder or employee of that corporation let moral judgements interfere with the profit motive.
If the CEO of a large company decides not to campaign for more police time to be spent on protecting intellectual property because he believes to do so would be "immoral", not only can he be fired, shareholders in the corporation can in fact bring legal action against him for not acting in the best interests of the corporation.
Basically, it's not just that amoral soulless assholes are attracted to executive positions in large corporations, it's also that you cannot serve in an executive position at a large corporation without being an amoral soulless asshole.
> I pirate an album and Britney Spears loses 2 dollars. A girl gets violently raped and her entire life is damaged and she may never
> recover. Which of these two things are more important?
If I pirate a Britney Spears album, my entire life is damaged and I may never recover.
> I can think of heaps of peole, myself included, who would have loved a trip like this, and could have made a detailed write up
/. weren't confused by the minutia of my job due to a poorly-written-up slideshow.
> that made sense, and did justice to the hard work and conditions those people work in.
So true. If I was forced by circumstance to work for pennies a day dully repeating the same task over and over again like a soulless automaton, breathing in noxious vapours and having nothing to look forward to in my working life but countless hours of soldering, I know that my biggest concern would be making sure that nerds on
> Yes, but when you start Windows for the first time, it asks you to set a password. When you plug in your router, it does not ask > you to set up wireless encryption. You can always leave the password blank for Windows, but you were at least given a prompt to set > one.
Yes, but by default the Adminstrator password is left blank, with the username "Administrator".
Please let's not have another pointless "Is the GIMP a Photoshop replacement?" debate. They're about as pointless as an ostensibly professional-level graphics editing program without proper CMYK support.
> There is no reason a PC is more likely to be infected with "spyware, popups, and other garbage" than an Apple.
/. on whether or not OS X and *nix suffer from fewer viruses, exploits and malware because they're inherently more secure or because they have a relatively low market share, it's definitely true that given users that will click through $x warnings from their OS to install the latest coloured cursors or free screensavers from notspyware.biz, it's practically impossible to keep a box running any OS uncompromised without removing the power of the user to administrate their own system entirely.
You're overstating the case a little, perhaps, but the point is valid.
It's quite possible to harden a Windows box so as to need very little maintenence. The truth is, these days all it takes to set up a reasonably reliable system is a $400 Dell PC with XP and a $50 router with NAT. Install some free AV software like AVG or Avast!, set it to update automatically and use on-access protection, set Windows update to automatically download and install updates, and, critically, give the user(s) of the PC a fifteen minute demonstration of the types of software not to install from untrusted parties, and they shouldn't run into too many problems.
If they do get infected with something after the above scenario, it will typically be because of software they installed despite your warnings on not installing random gratis software from websites hosted in eastern europe - and while there's an endless debate on
All we'd need then would be a well-trained team of people to recover damaged robots. If only we could think of a way to make them look non-threatening, so that enemy robots would know not to shoot at them...
I'm glad they settled on the "bear" look then. Now that that hurdle has been overcome, the only other matter, of designing and building a functional, reliable semi-autonomous bipedal robot, should be trivial.
C:\>ping google.com
Resolved "google.com" to [64.233.167.99]
Hello! Welcome to AT&T PingSelect(tm). Please enter in milliseconds your desired ping time to website "google.com".
>25
Unfortunately, website "google.com" is not available at that ping time. Please contact the website administrator and advise them to upgrade their AT&T PingSelect(tm) package if you wish to ping website "google.com" at this value. Please select another time in milliseconds.
>50
Unfortunately, website "google.com" is not available at that ping time. Please contact the website administrator and advise them to upgrade their AT&T PingSelect(tm) package if you wish to ping website "google.com" at this value. Please select another time in milliseconds.
>100
Pinging google.com [64.233.167.99] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=100ms TTL=247
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=101ms TTL=247
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=101ms TTL=247
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=100ms TTL=247
Ping statistics for 64.233.167.99:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 100ms, Maximum = 101ms, Average = 101ms
C:\>
Please do yourself a favour and take an economics 101 course. In a perfectly competitive market, marginal cost (MC) is equal to marginal revenue (MR) is equal to price (P). This is where equilibrium is found, and where societal benefit (producer surplus + consumer surplus) is maximised.